The doctor flinched, as though she'd hit him. "I'll come back tomorrow," he said cautiously. "Meanwhile, if there's any problems, send for me."
She stepped aside to let him pass, but when he'd gone she turned away. The last place she wanted to be was in the tent, with him.
16
His authority confirmed, General Daurenja held a briefing for the sappers and miners. It was dark by the time it finished, which fitted the schedule perfectly. While the meeting was going on, the quartermasters' division went round the camp gathering up every lantern they could find, filling them with fresh oil and trimming the wicks. Another detail reported to the foot of the machine trench, where the carpenters had spent the day putting up a large holding pen. At dusk, the stockmen drove in four hundred draught oxen. A rumour quickly spread that the oxen were going to be slaughtered, butchered and salted down to supplement the dwindling meat ration, and a crowd gathered, firmly convinced they'd be giving away offal and tripe. Instead, they were pressed into service yoking the oxen into one enormous team. It soon turned out that nobody knew how this was to be done; the general had given the order, presumably in the belief that someone had the knowledge and the necessary equipment, and it was only when the animals had been paired up and driven under their individual yokes that the full depth of the problem became apparent. The drovers pointed out, loudly and often, that oxen had to be yoked to a rigid beam, such as a cart-pole. The staff major who'd just discovered, much to his annoyance, that he was apparently in charge of this stage of the operation pointed out that he didn't have a pole or a beam or a tree-trunk long enough to yoke two hundred pair to, because it was impossible that such a thing should exist. The drovers asserted that that wasn't their fault; if someone had asked them earlier, they'd have told them it couldn't be done. The major replied that it could be done, because it had to be done, because the general had given an order; then, rather more calmly, he said that he was sure he'd heard somewhere about huge teams of oxen being used to drag enormous stone blocks on sledges, so it was possible, and presumably a stonemason would know about that sort of thing. Consulted on the point, the stonemasons said that they'd heard of such a thing, but none of them had done it themselves or talked to anybody who'd ever seen it done. One mason, dissenting, said that he'd heard that six hundred oxen had been used to drag the lintel stones when they built the municipal flour-mill in Mezentia; if the major wanted advice, all he had to do was take a walk down the trench, swim the ditch, climb the embankment, knock on the City gates and ask to speak to the clerk of works.
The discussion was interrupted by the arrival of a colonel of engineers from the general's staff, who wanted to know what the hold-up was. On being told the reason, he ordered the major to think of something, and left quickly.
At this point, someone remembered the chain.
Nobody knew what it was or what it had once been used for. They'd found it in the ruins of a burnt-out transport depot beside the Lonazep road, and the most popular theory was that the Mezentines had made it for their customers in the Old Country, part of the payment for the services of the mercenaries they'd hired for the attack on Civitas Eremiae. For some reason it had never got to Lonazep; instead, it had been left in a shed, as often happens to awkward consignments, until the war overtook it and deprived it of significance and purpose. General Daurenja had read about it in some report and ordered that it should be sent to Civitas Vadanis to be broken up for scrap; it was four hundred yards long, each link weighing fifty pounds, all steel, so hard a file could scarcely cut it. The problem of shifting it had been passed around the transport executive like a hot coal until the commander of an Aram Chantat infantry division, with a point to prove in some long-forgotten argument, undertook to see to it. He sent two regiments to the depot site, where his men struggled for five days with rollers and levers to lay the chain out in a straight line. Then the regiments lined up beside the chain, and on the word of command, each man bent down and lifted up one link. It took them two days to get the chain back to the camp, at which point the commander, who'd forgotten about his undertaking, reassigned the regiments to other duties.
The major wasn't keen on the idea. For one thing, there was the obvious problem of shifting the thing. Furthermore, there was the matter of the weight, which he anticipated would burden the oxen so much that they wouldn't be able to do the job they'd been brought there for. Also, how were the yokes to be attached to the chain, and who was going to lift it up while it was being attached? In any case, the chain was, by definition, not a rigid beam; if a flexible beam would suffice, they might as well use rope and have done with it.
By now, however, the idea of the chain had taken hold in the minds of the senior engineers, who started suggesting solutions to the problems he'd raised, disagreeing with each other and all shouting at once. Why not a flexible beam, they wanted to know; and the drovers, when this question was put to them, replied that they'd specified rigid beams because that was all they'd ever used, but for all they knew a flexible beam might work, though they wouldn't be held responsible if it didn't. The stockmen disagreed fundamentally among themselves on the weight issue, one faction maintaining that an extra hundredweight or so was nothing to a good ox, the other asserting that it'd take six hundred oxen just to pull the chain. Bringing the chain and lifting it was dismissed as a trivial concern, especially by the Vadani miners. The camp was overflowing with Aram Chantat, they said, who sat around all day doing nothing while brave Vadani dug in the trenches and got shot at. Let them do it, and make themselves useful for a change.
Faced with this difference of opinion, the major referred the matter to General Daurenja, who expressed deep concern that the issue hadn't been addressed earlier, deplored the fact that they were now severely behind schedule, and ordered the major to use the chain. Taking this order as his authority, the major sent for three regiments of the Aram Chantat and an additional hundred oxen.
It was now pitch dark, and every third man in the Aram Chantat contingent was issued with a lantern, so he could walk beside the chain-carriers and light the way. The shortest, straightest route was right through the middle of the camp, and the Mezentine observers on the embankment reported that the enemy were holding some kind of festival, involving a torchlight procession. This was taken as an indication that it would be a quiet night, and four of the five artillery batteries were allowed to stand down and go home.
Shortly after midnight, when the chain was finally in place and lashed securely to the yokes with requisitioned cart-reins, a small party of sappers slipped quietly into the trench, dragging behind them trolleys mounted with large spools for paying out rope. The Mezentines' attention, what there was of it, was concentrated on the lights of the presumed festival, so they weren't observed as they fed the rope ends through the pulleys attached to the stakes they'd planted and cemented in a few days earlier. They checked the pulleys were greased and running smoothly, then led the ropes back up the trench. One end they tied to the last link of the chain. The other went round the towing hitches bolted to the fronts of the worms.
There was a young Mezentine artilleryman, Lucazo Boerzes, a member in good standing of the Wiremakers', and for some reason (his motivation has not been recorded) he decided to climb down the embankment and creep up behind the trench bank to get a closer look at the enemy festival. Anticipating trouble, or maybe simply because he was the sort of young man who made the most of any opportunity to carry a weapon, he took with him his bow, a quiver of arrows and a sword. It was later remembered that he'd been an enthusiastic member of the lunchtime archery club, and had twice scored a verified hit. Crawling most of the way, he eventually reached the head of the trench, where he'd seen a large concentration of moving lights. He was bewildered to see a long column of cattle, and his first thought was that these animals were being driven off to be slaughtered, either as part of some Aram Chantat religious ceremony or to feed the festival-goers. As he came closer, however, he couldn't help noticing that the cows (he'd never left the City before in his life, and didn't appreciate the difference between an ox and a cow) were wearing collars, which were somehow attached to what he recognised as a naval blockading chain, designed to be stretched across the mouth of a harbour to prevent ships from entering. It was, in fact, the chain he himself had worked on-his shift had drawn the bar stock from which the links had been formed-and he was entirely at a loss as to how to account for it being there, when it should have been spanning a harbour mouth somewhere in the Old Country. Fortunately, there was plenty of light, although he himself was safely outside it and therefore to all intents and purposes invisible; he carefully worked himself in closer, and saw that the chain was connected to a series of ropes lying in the trench. He couldn't help noticing too a number of large and completely unfamiliar-looking machines, also with ropes attached to them.